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“God! how selfish of me to keep old Dad waiting for so long! I must get back at once!”

He disappeared, and Cordelia, who had been watching him from above, far more intently and nervously than he had been watching her, breathed a sigh of relief.

She was alone again. “Shall I go on?” she thought, “or go back? Crummie wants me. Mother wants me. Dad will be fussing about me. If Mr. Evans comes and I'm out, he'll think my feelings were hurt by the way he acted this morning. Oh, let them all want me! I've been considerate to everybody too long. I've thought of everybody except myself too long.” She looked round, pondering.

“No, no, I don't care if they do want me!*' and she turned resolutely to the dark hillside above her. ”I don't care if they do have to wait for me! I don't care if I never see any of them again; if I never go back, down there, ever again!"

She began rapidly ascending the hill. The air seemed to grow fresher as she advanced. What a dusty, colourless, neutral day it had been! But the blue twilight had been strange! And what queer vapours, though there was notliing damp in the air, had kept gathering, separating, rolling away, in confused retreat, over the banks of the Brue and over the gardens of Street Road. It had been partly the strange twilight that had lured her forth— that and this new restlessness in her blood. . . .

This slope of Chalice Hill had been one of her favorite resorts. When her “bad” moods were upon her she always went off alone to one or other of such places. “It's one of my resorts,” she would have said, if Crummie had questioned her.

In every little town in England there are probably several eccentric women who habitually break loose from their family and realise their inmost selves by excursions to certain particular spots. Such people often end by becoming half-crazy. Sometimes they end by committing suicide; but it is without question that in the interim between their slavery to their family and this madness or this suicide, as they visit these favorite resorts and carry there their inhuman, contra-human thoughts, they experience raptures of a dark, strange quality such as so-called “contented” people may go through a whole life and never know! What a destiny these lonely resorts of these lonely people come to know! There can hardly be a village in England or a small town in England—the great cities of course drown all such things by the washing of their huge tides of humanity—where there are not certain isolated spots loaded with the wild thoughts of these solitary ones. They have a fate like Io, the heifer-maid, these women, driven mad by the gadfly of Hera! Every one of them is a prophetess, a companion of Prometheus! Every one of them has been spiritually ravished by the great unmerciful Father of all Lies! How those lonely spots must be impregnated with these women's rebellious imaginations! How they must carry these strange, rapturous thought-children, watered by floods and deluges of releasing, melting, dissolving obliterating tears, and leave them there to be nourished by the Mother of us all!

The lonely meadows and orchards of this particular hillside and especially certain bare patches of common land, without hedge, or railing, or furrow, or crop, or bush, or tree, had long rendered Chalice Hill one of Cordelia's favorite refuges. These had been her escape years before her father inherited the Rector of Northwold' s money. Of late, since the local chatter about their buying Chalice House, she had rather tended to avoid the place and to select others. Tonight, however, she felt that nothing but Chalice Hill would ease her mind. She had fancied that she knew the spot so well that she would attain with ease a certain bare expanse of grass that she held in her thoughts; but she had not allowed, as we seldom do allow, for the psychic pressure of the darkness itself, like a living entity surrounding her. This invasion of the bewildered senses of a day-dweller by the enfolding presence of night is a unique phenomenon in human experience. However frequently it may have been felt it always returns with a shock of disturbing surprise. The darkness becomes a polymorphous amorist, irresistible, not to be stayed! We beat it back with blinded sight, paralysed touch, confused hearing. But there is nothing of us that it does not invade! When it is a woman who is in its grasp i/ seems to arouse something in the feminine nature corresponding to itself, so that the recessive mystery of darkness in the woman—that underground tide of the old ancestral chaos that ebbs and flows at the bottom of her being—rushes forth to meet this primal sister, this twin daughter of the Aboriginal Abyss, whose incestuous embrace is all about her! Cordelia seemed unable to escape from the apple orchards on Chalice Hill. She was perfectly familiar with these in the daylight and had often lightly and quickly clambered over the low walls that surround them; but tonight they seemed to extend like an enchanted forest. Insula Avallonia! She was certainly wrestling with a soil and with the growths of a soil that were more soaked in legends than any other hillside in Wessex. Legends seemed to thicken around her as she struggled blindly on between these budding apple trees. The fresh spring grass at the feet of these trees seemed in that darkness to be growing out of an earth that yielded to each step she took, an earth that was porous with mystery, an earth that was descending into supernatural dimensions where it had its unrealisable roots. How soft to her touch, as she stretched out her arms and her bare hands, were the branches and the trunks of these apple trees! Would she never escape into the high bare uplands? These apple trunks that she encountered seemed to grow thicker around her as she struggled up the grassy slope. They seemed to respond to her groping hands with a magnetic effluence of dark, rich, inscrutable vitality. They were like a sisterhood of invisible beings about her, full of sympathy with her feeling, impeding her progress wTith their mute conspiracy of understanding. Her brain was whirling with wild imaginings. Tears were now pouring down her cheeks; not unhappy tears, but sweet, relieving, abandoning, delicious tears. She wanted to free herself from these sister-arms, but the darkness itself was weakening her resistance to them with its own sister-passion, a passion older than the world. The master thought that drove her on was the thought of the unhappiness of her lover. “What is it? What is it?” her brain kept repeating. “He is unhappy; and I know not what it is! I thought I knew him through and through—but oh, I know not wThat it is!”

Cordelia had almost reached the point of feeling as if she liad become enchanted, or, in a more realistic sense, as if she had gone crazy and were going round and round in a circle instead of ascending, when she suddenly found herself on the top of the hill and in open ground. Not only was she now in a bare field, but she knew exactly where she was. She was near the place where a footpath over the other side of Chalice Hill led to the lane where the two giant oaks grew. Mr. Evans had talked to her many times about these oaks. He of course associated them with the Druids. But Cordelia had heard quite a different story from her father's new secretary who had informed her that they had been planted to mark the spot wThere the Vikings had landed!

Mr. Geard's daughter now became awTare that some large and mysterious release had come to her vexed spirit.

There came a change in the weather too as she made her way across Stonedown and approached the hamlet of Wick. She felt it at once as she swung along, walking so fast and free, some-limes with her hands tightly clenched, and sometimes with her fingers so loosely extended that they trailed amid the chilly umbrageousness on both sides of the little lane. Cold gusts of wind she felt rising. She felt them blowing, not regularly, but intermittently. They blew over Wick Hollow, over Bulwarks Lane, over Maidencroft Lane, and whenever they reached her body they swirled round it as if they would have washed her, or laved her or exorcised her! Intermittent and erratic as they were and though they veered a little according to the lay of the land, they came on the whole from the northwest. From the Bristol Channel they came, and from further away than that. They came from Mr. Evans' native country, from the native country of her own ancestors; they came—like those strange stones at Stone-henge—from South Wales.

Cordelia reached the nearest of her great oaks—whether Viking or Druid—in what seemed to her so short a time that she felt as if she had been spirited there in the teeth of these western gusts. She came upon the oaks from the top of the eastern hedge-bank, for she had come, on her wild approach, recklessly across the country. Here on the top of this hedge-bank she rested, clutching a sweet-scented hazel-branch with one hand and a bitter-scented elder-branch with the other. The wind rose about her as she stood there, in wilder and wilder gusts. And then Cordelia, gazing directly into the wide-flung branches of the biggest of the two giant trees, was aware of something else upon the wind. Those enormous branches seemed to have begun an orchestral monotone, composed of the notes of many instruments gathered up into one. It was a cumulative and rustling sigh that came to the woman's ears, as if a group of sorrowful Titans had lifted up their united voices in one lamentable dirge over the downfall of their race. It kept beginning afresh, this solemn moan upon the air—a moan which always mounted to a certain pitch and then sank down. Sometimes, such were the vagaries of the wind, before this portentous requiem started afresh, there was a singular humming and droning in those huge branches, as if the tree wished to utter a private secret of its own to Cordelia's ears, before it recommenced its official chant. Yes! the peculiarity of this humming sound was that it shivered and shook with a special intonation for the woman standing upon the bank! And Cordelia knew well what that message was. The great tree was telling the hillside that there was rain upon the wind; but it was telling Cordelia something else! Then all was absolutely still; and in that stillness, a stillness like the terrible stillness of uttermost strain in travail, there came the first cry of birth, the fall of a single drop of rain. That first drop was followed by another and that again by another. Cordelia did not hear them in the same place* One drop would fall upon the roadway beneath her; one upon a dead burdock leaf; one upon a faded hart's tongue fern of last year's growth. Then the sound of the falling drops would be drowned in a reawakening of that orchestral dirge. Then the wind would die down over all the upland, and once more an absolute stillness would descend; and in the stillness again—only now in an increased number—the big raindrops would splash to earth, one falling upon a dead leaf, one upon a naked stone, one upon a knot of close-grown twigs, one upon Cordelia's bare forehead. Her feeling at that moment was that some deep psychic chain had been broken in her inmost being.

Hola—Hola! She could not restrain herself from giving vent to a wild cry of exultant delight as the first bursting deluge followed these premonitory drops. She waited for a minute or two with upturned head and closed eyes, letting the water stream upon her face. Then, slithering down the wet bank she reached the lane; and without a glance in the direction of the oaks, which were now totally invisible, she began, with head bowed down and fingers tightening upon her jacket collar, to make her way back to the town. Only once, on her way back, did she pause and glance upward at the down-pouring blackness. This was when she distinctly heard the drumming of an airplane somewhere above her head. “That's Philip Crow,” she thought to herself, “travelling like the devil through the black rain! He's off to Wookey Hole !”

WOOKEY HOLE

The Mayor of Glastonbury had finished his breakfast and was reading the Western Gazette. Mr. Timothy Wollop was an honest man. He had never deliberately cheated a ftllow-creature of a farthing. He was a self-controlled man. He had never, since the death of his father, Mr. Constantine Wollop., lost his temper with any living soul. To his father, now in his grave in the cemetery on the Wells Road, Mr. Wollop had been irritable on several occasions. But old Constantine's ways towards the end had been past all bearing. A saint would have cursed the old wretch. A philosopher wTould have done worse. An ordinary man would have murdered him. But Timothy had only been just perceptibly cross! Mr. Wollop had neither wife nor children. His servants were kept at such a respectful distance that they may be said to have been non-existent. They were the hands that kept his house clean and warm and that brought him his moderate meals at reasonable hours. Had they been the Ravens that fed Elisha, or the invisible attendants who waited upon the Prince in the fairy story, they could not have been more de-humanised. Mr. Timothy Wollop lived to himself. To say that because he was lonely he was unhappy would have been to utter the extreme opposite of the truth. Mr. Wollop was one of the happiest men in Somersetshire. He neither smoked, nor drank, nor whored. He never gave way, even in the solitary watches of the night, to the feverish pricks of sensual desire. As soon as his head touched the pillow he fell asleep. Of what did Mayor Wollop dream? He never dreamed; or, if he did, he forgot his dream so completely on awakening, that for a man to say, “I dreamed like Mayor Wollop,” would be tantamount to saying “My sleep was dreamless.” Of what did Mayor Wollop think as he walked from his house in Wells Road to his shop in High Street? He thought of what he saw. In truth it may be said that with the exception of Bert Cole no one in Glastonbury regarded the Panorama of Things and Persons with more absorbing interest than did its Mayor. Not a stink or a stone, not a bit of orange-peel in any gutter, not a sparrow upon any roof, not a crack in any window, not any aspect of the weather, wet or fine, not any old face or any new face, not any familiar suit of clothes or any unexpected suit of clothes, not any dog, or cat, or canary, or pigeon, or,horse, or bicycle or motor car, not any new leaf on an old branch, not any old leaf on a new roof—but Timothy Wollop noted it, liked to see it there, and thought about its being there. The Mayor was one of those rare beings who really like the wTorld we all have been born into. More than that; oh, much more than that! The Mayor was obsessed with a trance-like absorption of interest, by the appearance of our world exactly as it appeared. What worries some, disconcerts others, agitates others, saddens others, torments others, makes others feel responsibility, sympathy, shame, remorse, had no effect upon the duck's back of Mr. Wollop beyond the peaceful titillation of surface-interest. Below appearances Mr. Wollop never went. Below the surfaces of appearances he never went! If the unbearable crotchets of his father had been confined to the old man's thoughts, Mr. Wollop would never have been ruffied. People's thoughts were non-existent to the Mayor of Glastonbury; and if there is a level of possibility more non-existent than non-existence itself, such a level was filled (for him) by people's instincts, feelings, impulses, aspirations, intuitions. The servants in his house, as far as any interior personality was concerned, might have been labelled A. B. C. and the assistants in his shop, in the same sense, might have been named D. E. F. When B. (shall we say?), a female servant in a fit of hysterics, put on her cap back to front, Mr. Wollop was as interested as when on his walk to his shop he mildly observed that a well-known tabby-cat's ear had been bitten off. When E. (shall we say?), a male shop-assistant, appeared one morning tricked up for a funeral, Mr. Wollop enjoyed the same quiet stir as wThen on his walk down High Street he noticed that a black frost had killed all the petunias in old Mrs. Cole's window-box. Mr. vVollop had once overheard one of his younger shop-assistants—a young man in Those sleek black hair he had come to take a quiet interest, wondering what hair-wash the lad patronised—refer to something called “Neetchky.” From the context Mr. Wollop gathered that “Neetchky” could hardly be the name of a hair-wash. It seemed rather to be some pious formula used by the young man. by which he threw off responsibility for having got some young woman into trouble. At that point Mr. Wollop's interest ceased, just as it had ceased when the question arose as to hoiv the tabby-cat had lost its ear. Mr. Wollop had no quarrel with young men who had formulas for dodging responsibility, as long as they did their work in the shop. What he was conscious of was a certain puzzled contempt for anyone whose selfishness was so weak and shaky that it required a pious formula! Mr. Wollop needed no formula, pious or otherwise. The appearance of things was the nature of things; and all things, as they presented themselves to his attention, in his house, in the street, and in his shop, fed his mind with slow, agreeable, unruffled ponderings. Mr. Wollop was not greedy at his meals, though he frequently thought of his meals; and, as I have hinted, he was totally devoid of specialised sensuality. No man, no woman, no child could ever have said, if they spoke the truth, that they had caught the Mayor of Glastonbury fixing upon them a lecherous eye. The truth seems to be that the Mayor was exactly like young Bert Cole. Bert and Mayor Wollop diffused the projection of their amorous propensities over the whole surface of their world; and their world was what they saiv.